The landscape of technology is a fast paced, ever-evolving, and exciting sector for modern society. So exciting, in fact, that for years, big tech has played into the hype that rapid advancements in tech leads to. Elon Musk, for instance, has effectively used his influence to generate interest in his various projects and ideas, targeting younger and tech-savvy audiences.
In 2015, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization, was founded with the goal of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity. Elon Musk played an instrumental role in the creation of the organization and contributed significant funding.
Musk, along with industry experts Sam Altman and IIya Suskever, promoted the organization through its supposed efforts to develop AI as a safe and ethically responsible technology by prioritizing long term safety over competitive gains.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released a generative AI chatbot called ChatGPT. The chatbot uses natural language processing to allow users to interact with a massive database collected from the internet up to fall of 2021.
Within days of the relatively quiet release, millions of users had signed up to get their chance at interacting with the AI. By January, the biggest tech companies had taken notice and began implementing the technology into their own systems or releasing their own imitations of the software.
The hype around the term ‘AI’ continued to grow into early 2023 and led to the widespread use of the term to aid in marketing new products which claimed to use the technology to improve user experience.
The problem is, despite the fact that these companies have marketing projects and products around the buzz word, ChatGPT and others like it, is not a true AI. In fact, there is no true artificial intelligence as of the writing of this article. True artificial intelligence, which is referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI) by industry experts, is defined as an artificial system that can think, learn, understand, and apply knowledge across a wide variety of tasks at a level that is comparable to human intelligence. AGI, once created, would be able to communicate knowledge across domains, adapt and work dynamically, solve problems independently, all without explicit programming which instructs it to do so.
In contrast, the technology that is currently in use and is advertised by large tech companies is primarily designed for specific, goal based tasks and problem solving within a limited domain.
ChatGPT, as well as other AI’s such as Stable Diffusion-an image generating software- and various voice generation softwares do not utilize AGI. Instead, they are complex and highly developed imitation softwares which feed off of large amounts of data created and uploaded by humans to output eerily human-like creations.
These new systems are certainly groundbreaking, and have the potential to significantly alter the way we live. The iPhone, unveiled in the mid 2000s, was instantly recognized as a device capable of fundamentally changing human interactions and soon became a necessity for much of the modern world. AI, for what it is today, represents a new addition to our lives to be used as a tool in advancing our abilities, not as a true intelligence capable of overtaking humans in thinking and doing.
We need to recognize how big tech companies are influencing us by fostering over-excitement and anticipation around AGI to promote products which do not fall under the category which they appear to represent.
Weak artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, needs to be recognized as a groundbreaking technology in the right ways. We are currently at a crossroads of deciding how these technologies will define our future.
In order to approach these new frontiers with the goal of improving mankind, we have to see through the manipulation that clouds our vision. We need to stay educated and informed about what AI is, and is not, and keep track of future developments. We need to have serious and goal oriented conversations about how we wish to approach uses for AI. We need to hold those accountable who write the code, distribute the product, and influence the direction of the technology.
Recognizing the technologies we have today for what they truly are and collaborating to create a path forward that benefits humanity at large will allow us to mitigate fear surrounding AI and limit the power of tech giants.
